A new space plane gets ready for launch from Florida
There’s a new spaceship in town. It will remind you of the space shuttle because it takes off on a rocket and lands like a glider. The newest space plane program is called Dream Chaser, built by a company called Sierra Space and designed to make cargo runs to and from the International Space Station. The first model is named Tenacity. It arrived at the Kennedy Space Center last week, and will make its debut launch in September.
“Oh, it’s a possibility I might be flying, it’s a possibility you could be a passenger as well,” recently retired NASA astronaut Dr. Tom Marshburn told me in a Zoom interview. Marshburn works for Sierra Space now, helping them design human-friendly living quarters.
“Sierra Space is one of the companies at the forefront of getting people access to low earth orbit, Sierra Space is all about building a research platform, manufacturing capability, extremely robust business capability in low earth orbit,” Marshburn explained. They are building an inflatable space station module, stronger than steel, yet much easier to customize for any type of research. It easily passed a rigorous NASA stress test. Once it’s deployed, and that’s several years away, it will provide opportunities for space-created breakthroughs possible only in zero gravity, such as new drugs and therapies.
“What Sierra Space wants to do is bring people there, universities, companies, their best researchers, their best technicians, to go into space and do this work directly,” Marshburn explained.
A practicing emergency room physician before being recruited by NASA, Marshburn had an exemplary career as an astronaut, serving on three missions, doing space walks, and living in the space station for months at a time. I asked him if he’s still inspired by space travel.
“Oh, absolutely, because space flight is just that way,” Marshburn said. “And the memories that I treasure the most are looking back at earth, from space, with a crewmate, discussing it with another human being.” And you see the fragility of the planet that we all call home, I said.
“I think what sticks in my brain the most is the fragility of the human species and therefore how precious we are, and how much we need to take care of this incubator, this home, this planet earth,” Marshburn responded. There is no planet “B”, but the work being done now is blazing a trail for the interplanetary space travel on the horizon.